Traveling Through Life Together with God

I was stumped with what to write for the post today. So I asked Mike what are his thoughts on marriage. Now, I must say that my beloved is a man of few words, so it did not surprise me when he didn’t have much to say.

Here is what he did say:

Marriage is like a carriage
That two people ride in,
Go through this life
Share things together
Love one another

(With that I was reminded of where my middle son, Sean, gets his poetic-ness from, because I am not readily poetic. ) He was kind of just being silly but the truth is that sometimes married couples are more like two people driving on the same road in separate vehicles sharing their lives in a limited fashion than going through life in the same vehicle. When you jump into the same vehicle, there is only one person doing the driving but because we are in the same vehicle we can communicate easily, decide together where to go, and have shared experiences. {An interesting thought I had when thinking about this is that when we travel, I help by navigating (reading the directions and looking out for road changes and such and relaying them to him as he drives). In our marriage, he makes the final decision but I help by sharing things that I see or helping to navigate through our life.}

I then asked him, “What makes our marriage work?” To which he responded:

Our commitment to God and each other through the ups and downs

Get closer to God and your marriage gets better because He ordained marriage from the beginning.

With God all things are possible.

One thing I’d add to this is that when we got married, we committed to forever. Divorce was not an option for us. Or as my dear friend Joyce put it, there is no “out clause.” There have been moments when the only reason we stayed together was because we had no other option. (Now I will point out that there has never been any biblical reasons in our marriage for a divorce either: no abuse, no adultery, and we’re both believers.) Those moments passed as we confirmed our commitment to work out our differences and feelings, giving more care and attention to what we do and say, trying not to offend the other and making a little more effort to show the other love in a way they feel loved.